This will be a boring side topic that nobody cares about but ITC asked me what I found interesting about that article and diggler said this
First let me stipulate I’m an English major and an idiot who talks out of his ass. With that out of the way
I now work on the product management/development side, and I feel like diggler’s analysis is emblematic of the Big Capital Problem. A startup should have a product that solves an actual need and differentiate itself from existing products by XYZ and has a path to being profitable. At the highest end of VC/tech funding like Uber/Netflix/DoorDash, they skipped some major steps and there is no path to profitability except for raising your prices or exploiting your labor, neither of which is sustainable. And yet you can take those companies public and trade on them and get rich AF or sell them for a 100x and get rich AF, and you’ve created absolutely zero value.
And in the case of Netflix, who cares if they go out of business, it was entertaining and for a while before they had competitors, cheap for customers and decent for creators. No real harm done. But in the case of Uber you decimated an industry (cabs) and exploited cheap labor and you don’t have a real product that will last even with your other verticals. DoorDash even worse for restaurants, killing what was already a razor thin margin.
Feels like a serious structural problem exacerbating inequality and not a very good and just and neoliberal well regulated market approach to running an economy. I don’t really care at the end of the day that the Atlantic needed to put “millennial” into the angle to get people to click, I feel like we misdiagnose the underlying issue in our typical conversation about this. But if I missed the conversation and it was already had, oh well.
